Post Mortem

This unique autobiographical novel is, in effect, a son’s bitter requiem to his dead parents. In a collage of memory, Yoram Kaniuk reconstructs the inner music of his parents’ lives, which is, in its turn, the music of place and period. The backbone of the book is the life and death of Sarah Kaniuk, the writer’s mother, a domineering, rigid, and hostile woman who punished her son for her disappointments.

Through Moshe Kaniuk, the author’s father, the book explores the extent to which the young city of Tel Aviv drew on German-Jewish refugee culture. Germany is represented by an intractable, tormenting and murderous heroine who seduces the narrator, a Sabra who twists in the uneasy grip of his Janus-like German heritage. The author reconstructs unforgettable, bittersweet scenes of Tel Aviv. His descriptions of his grandparents and of preparations for the imminent Nazi invasion of Palestine are some of the book’s highlights.